The present invention relates to clipper circuits, and in particular to a clipper in CMOS technology.
A clipper circuit is used to clip the maximum voltage or current of a signal. A soft clipper, rather than imposing a fixed maximum level, reduces the slope of the transfer function at a specified knee point.
One application for a clipper circuit would be in converting an analog signal into digital form, where it is desirable to limit the maximum value to be within the range of the analog-to-digital converter. The knee of the clipper circuit can be positioned either near the minimum or near the maximum position depending upon where the most significant data may be found.
Clipper circuits have been implemented in Bipolar or BiCMOS processes. Typically, a knee point for varying the slope is set with a control voltage.
It would be desirable to have a circuit which could implement a soft clipper in CMOS technology.